Introduction

The Author

Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin was born on the tenth of October 1852 in the village of Mityakino, in the Saratov province, the son of a parish priest. He was schooled first at the Saratov theological seminary and then, from 1874, at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1878. Even as a student he had drawn near to the world of learned journals, doing correctional and literary work in their editorial offices and publishing, while still at the Academy, a substantial study of the Old Testament prophets. Languages came easily to him, and by the time he left the Academy he had already marked himself out as a gifted and disciplined young biblicist with an unusual command of English. That command shaped the course of his life.

In July of 1879 he was appointed psalmist—a reader and chanter—at the Russian embassy church in New York, and there he served for the next several years, into the early 1880s. It is on this American sojourn that the present volume rests. A man of learning set down in a young and restless country, Lopukhin watched its religious life with the double attention of a churchman and a scholar, and what he saw impressed him so deeply that it colored the whole of his later work. He came home neither a partisan of America nor its detractor, but its first serious Russian interpreter, convinced that a nation so unlike his own had a great deal to teach and a great deal to warn against.

On his return he made America the subject of his early scholarship. In 1881 he defended and published his master’s dissertation, Roman Catholicism in America, and over the decade that followed he issued a series of studies, sketches, and lectures on the religious and social life of the United States. Meanwhile his academic career advanced steadily: he was named professor of comparative theology at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1883, and from 1885 held the chair of ancient civil history until his death. As an editor he became one of the most industrious figures in Russian church publishing, guiding the journal Strannik (The Wanderer) and launching, as a free supplement to it, the great enterprise for which he is best remembered—the Explanatory Bible (Tolkovaya Bibliya), a running commentary on every book of Scripture. He lived to complete only its first volume, his own commentary on the Pentateuch; he died on the twenty-second of August 1904, at the height of his powers, and the work was carried to completion by others across a dozen volumes between 1904 and 1913. He was buried at the Nikolskoye cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. The five American writings gathered here belong to the earliest and freshest season of that career—the reports of an observant young reader before he became the editor of the Russian Orthodox Bible.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

The five pieces in this volume were written across roughly a decade and a half, but they form a single sustained inquiry: what does the religious life of the United States actually look like, and what can an Orthodox Russia learn from it? Lopukhin approached America at a moment when almost no serious Russian account of the country existed. “We often call Americans our friends,” he wrote in one of these prefaces, “but only rarely do we admit that we scarcely know them at all.” His purpose, first and last, was to close that gap—to replace rumor and caricature with patient, first-hand observation.

Religion in America (composed at the turn of the 1880s) is his broad survey of the American religious landscape: the extraordinary energy of a people who, cut off from the old centers of belief by an ocean, had not lost their religious instinct but intensified it, together with the ceaseless “ferment” of denominations that instinct produced.

Roman Catholicism in America, subtitled A Study of the Present Condition and the Causes of the Rapid Growth of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States of North America, was his master’s dissertation of 1881. It sets itself a precise historical question—how a body that began in “insignificance” had risen within a single century toward the first rank among American churches, and that in the very country that had first written the separation of church and state into its law.

Life Across the Ocean, subtitled Sketches of the Religious, Social-Economic, and Domestic Life in North America, is the largest and most personal of the five—a book-length travelogue that carries the reader from St. Petersburg through Vienna, Zurich, Geneva, Paris, and London, across ten days of ocean, and into the streets, churches, holidays, and households of New York. Its later chapters turn homeward to the small Russian community and its embassy church in the American city.

The Transoceanic West in Its Religious and Moral Aspect began as a set of public lectures delivered in St. Petersburg during Great Lent, later gathered into a book. Here the occasion is explicitly Russian: Lopukhin frames America as a case study offered to an educated Russian society that he saw drifting toward “religious individualization”—the ordering of belief by private reason rather than by the Church.

The Centenary of the Orthodox Mission in North America (1894) marks the hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first Russian monastic missionaries at Kodiak Island in 1794. It is the most narrowly historical of the five, recounting the mission’s origins in the fur-trading voyages of the North Pacific and the labors of its first monks.

Taken together, the occasion of these works is one man’s determination to render America intelligible to his countrymen—its Protestant multiplicity, its Roman Catholic ascendancy, its constitutional experiment in religious liberty, and, closest to his heart, the young Orthodox mission planted on the same continent.

Argument & Structure

For all their variety of form, the five writings can be read as movements of a single argument, and it helps to see how each is built.

Religion in America opens from a single observation: the American people are intensely, restlessly religious, and their many confessions are less settled institutions than currents in a continuous search for religious truth. From this Lopukhin traces what he calls the process of “ferment”—the collision and reconciliation of diverse religious elements—through the Episcopal Church’s turn toward “catholicity” and its overtures to the Orthodox East, and on to the specifically American problems of religious liberty of conscience and religion in the public school. Its structure moves from a general diagnosis of the national temperament to particular test cases in law and education.

Roman Catholicism in America is the most rigorously organized of the five, built in three large parts: the first steps of Roman Catholicism on the continent (including the early Jesuit missions among the native peoples); its struggle for the freedom to exist amid Puritan and colonial hostility; and its external and internal growth into a major American body. Lopukhin’s governing question is causal—why growth so rapid, in soil so seemingly unfavorable—and he answers it historically, tracing what immigration, organization, and the discipline of a centralized church achieved against the fragmentation around it.

Life Across the Ocean is structured as a journey and then a residence. Its first movement, “On the Way to America,” is pure travel writing—the European capitals, the Atlantic crossing. The second, “Beyond the Ocean,” settles into American life through its holidays and habits: Christmas and carnival, Easter in America, the Bible in America, the “kingdom of the dollar,” revival meetings, and the fraternal lodges he calls “the knights of mystery.” A third movement, “Native Echoes,” turns to the Russians abroad—their festivals and sorrows, the Russian church in New York, and the Americans who found their way into it—before closing with social and economic notes on emigration and the promise of the new land. The reader who wants Lopukhin the man, rather than Lopukhin the analyst, will find him here.

The Transoceanic West follows the shape of the lectures that produced it. A first reading argues for the importance of studying American religious-moral life at all, and surveys the American public conscience—its Sunday schools, temperance and civic societies, and the moral seriousness Lopukhin admired in American democracy. A second reading turns to what he saw as the doctrinal and practical difficulties of a purely Protestant order—the multiplication of sects and the “unlimited arbitrary will” of independent preachers—and then to the countervailing American striving toward church unity, the revivals, and the Episcopal reach toward firmer catholic ground. The movement is from what America does well to the deeper question its divisions raise, and back to the yearning for unity those divisions provoke.

The Centenary of the Orthodox Mission proceeds chronologically from the North Pacific voyages of Russian traders and the expeditions that fixed the relation of the Asian and American coasts, through the merchant Shelikhov’s decision to consolidate the scattered “sowing of Christian seeds” into a properly organized mission, to the arrival and first labors of the monks at Kodiak. It is narrative history, told with evident reverence for the “simple monks” who, expecting no such destiny, carried the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

What gives these American reports their lasting interest is that Lopukhin never wrote as a mere correspondent. He read American religion theologically, and he read it as a mirror held up to his own society.

His deepest concern was the relation between religious truth and religious form. America struck him as living proof that “religious need lies in the very nature of the human spirit and is as eternal as the human spirit itself”—a standing rebuke to the “cold and soulless skepticism” he saw corroding an older Europe. He admired without reserve the vitality of American faith: a people among whom science and religion lived, as he put it, “in harmonious unity,” where educated men occupied themselves with religious questions and the skeptical literature of the old world “found almost no sale.” Against the materialism that had swept mid-century Europe, America seemed to him evidence that the human spirit turns back, inevitably, toward the mysterious and the holy.

Yet he saw the American situation as unfinished, even unstable—a vast “ferment” in search of a truth it could not quite reach. The multiplication of confessions and the authority he saw vested in the individual preacher and the individual conscience seemed to him to answer the hunger for religious truth with endless motion rather than rest. He was struck, accordingly, by every American movement toward unity and toward firmer, more ancient ground: the Episcopal turn to “catholicity,” the overtures toward the Orthodox East, the recurring protest of religious feeling against fragmentation. In these he read a genuine and hopeful longing.

His account of the rapid growth of Roman Catholicism belongs to the same analysis. He treated it not as a threat to be denounced but as a historical phenomenon to be explained—the success of a disciplined, centralized, and organized body in a landscape of division—and precisely as evidence of the same American hunger for authoritative, catholic form. His observations on Protestant and Roman Catholic America alike are reported as a historian reports, describing what each communion held and how each fared, without setting one against another as the arbiter of the whole.

For his Russian readers the moral was pointed but irenic. In The Transoceanic West he addressed an educated society he feared was drifting toward “religious individualization”—belief arranged by private reason—and he offered America as the classic instance of what follows when that tendency runs its course without settled ecclesial anchoring. America was, for him, at once an inspiration and a warning: inspiration in its undimmed religious energy and its civic moral seriousness, warning in the restlessness of a faith seeking form.

Running beneath all of this is a conviction that binds the five works into one: that the health of a people’s religious life depends on the sincerity of its belief and equally on the soundness of the form that carries it. Lopukhin credited America with an abundance of the first and worried about the second, and he was too honest an observer to pretend the two always went together. That tension—fervent faith seeking a stable and catholic shape—is the theological thread he followed across constitution, school, revival tent, and mission field alike.

The Centenary strikes a different and warmer note. There the significance is missionary and devotional: the wonder that the light of the Gospel reached Kodiak in the same years that the coasts of America were still being charted, carried not by a trained propaganda but by “simple monks” ready to endure every hardship for the truth. It is Lopukhin’s tribute to the zeal of the young Orthodox mission on American soil—the mission whose religious environment his other four studies had labored to describe.

Reception & Influence

These writings made Lopukhin, in effect, Russia’s first informed guide to American religious life, filling a gap he himself had named. Their afterlife is twofold. In their own moment they gave an educated Russian public a rare and detailed window onto a country it knew mostly by rumor, and Roman Catholicism in America, as an academic dissertation, earned him his master’s degree and the professorial career that followed. More broadly, they belong to the formation of the scholar who would go on to edit the Explanatory Bible and the Orthodox Theological Encyclopedia — great works of accessible, popularizing scholarship whose animating conviction, that serious religious learning should be put within reach of ordinary readers, is already fully present in these early American reports. For the modern reader they carry a further, unlooked-for value: they are a thoughtful outside observer’s snapshot of Gilded-Age American religion—its revivals and lodges, its schools and Sunday schools, its constitutional settlement of church and state—seen through Orthodox eyes at the very moment the Orthodox mission on the continent was taking root.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents a fresh modern English translation of five of Lopukhin’s Russian works on American religious life, prepared from the public-domain Russian texts as preserved in the digital library of azbyka.ru. The originals — Религия в Америке, Римский католицизм в Америке, Жизнь за океаном, Заокеанский Запад в религиозно-нравственном отношении, and Столетие православной миссии в Северной Америке — were written in the 1880s and 1890s; several first appeared as periodical essays or public lectures before being gathered into books. They are rendered here into clear, contemporary English while preserving the author’s inline emphasis, his paragraph structure, his own notes, and his scriptural references. Chapter and section numbers and scripture citations follow the house convention of Arabic numerals and a modern reference style. The translation aims throughout at faithful, readable prose that keeps the register of Lopukhin’s own nineteenth-century essayistic Russian without archaizing it.

A word on names and attribution. The author is given here as Alexander Lopukhin, a lay scholar and theologian; where his contemporaries styled him “Professor,” that title reflects his chairs at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy. He is best known to posterity as the editor of the Explanatory Bible, and it is worth remembering, as one reads these youthful American studies, that they are the work of the same mind that would later undertake to comment on the whole of Scripture for a general Russian readership.

Because these are the observations of a nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox visitor, the reader will meet frank judgments about the Protestant and Roman Catholic America of the 1880s—its divisions, its enthusiasms, its rapid growth. They are presented here as historical testimony, in the author’s own voice, and are best read as one perceptive contemporary’s account rather than as a settled verdict on any communion. Where his information reflects the state of knowledge of his day, that too is part of the document’s interest.

Suggestions for Reading

A reader new to Lopukhin need not take the five works in order. Life Across the Ocean is the natural doorway: its travel narrative and its scenes of American holidays, streets, and worship introduce both the country and the observer, and its later chapters on the Russian church in New York place the author himself before us. From there, Religion in America and The Transoceanic West supply the analytic frame—the diagnosis of American religious “ferment” and the questions it raised for Russia—while Roman Catholicism in America rewards those who want Lopukhin at his most rigorous and historical. The Centenary of the Orthodox Mission is best kept for last, or read on its own as a self-contained history: it turns from the wide American panorama to the single thread that mattered most to the author—the Orthodox mission carried across the Pacific by a handful of monks, whose hundred-year story gives these studies of a distant land their quiet center of gravity.